Pull Request: Adding support for nix buildpack in repo2docker by costrouc · Pull Request #407 · jupyterhub/repo2docker · GitHub
TLDR;
This pull request allows that by simply including a
default.nixfile in any public git repository you can enable anyone to launch a jupyter notebook with all those dependencies for free on a 1 core cpu in google cloud using https://mybinder.org/.
Within the python data science ecosystem there is a popular tool called binder notebooks which is:
- a tool to reproducibly convert a git repository to a docker environment
- jupyter notebook server
- only requires a browser to interact (enabling easy demos of software and quick exploration)
An example is worth a thousand words. Here you will explore the data used to verify gravitational waves with python.
Right now conda, python pip, R, and julia package managers are being used. As a nix user I see several issues with this approach especially if we are advocating reproducible data science.
- How do the package managers pin the packages? (In most instances they don’t)
- How to handle dependencies that are not the specific language package manager (conda does a someone good job at this)
- What if the repository needs to build some small tools before being an interactive notebook?
- Does it have package X?
Nix answers the following by using nix-shell for the environment. We can even pin everything to an exact git commit.
let
# Pinning nixpkgs to specific release
# To get sha256 use "nix-prefetch-git <url> --rev <commit>"
commitRev="5574b6a152b1b3ae5f93ba37c4ffd1981f62bf5a";
nixpkgs = builtins.fetchTarball {
url = "https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/archive/${commitRev}.tar.gz";
sha256 = "1pqdddp4aiz726c7qs1dwyfzixi14shp0mbzi1jhapl9hrajfsjg";
};
pkgs = import nixpkgs { config = { allowUnfree = true; }; };
in
pkgs.mkShell {
buildInputs = with pkgs; [
python36Packages.numpy python36Packages.scipy
python36Packages.jupyterlab
];
shellHook = ''
export NIX_PATH="nixpkgs=${nixpkgs}:."
'';
}
Questions that I have for the nix community of the pull request
Please go to the pull request Adding support for nix buildpack in repo2docker by costrouc · Pull Request #407 · jupyterhub/repo2docker · GitHub to provide feedback. I would like to allow any any repository with a default.nix to be explorable in a web browser.